James Evans

I am an economics major and history minor entering my fourth (and final) year at the University of California, Berkeley. I am currently a TEC Fellow for True Ventures, matched with Blue Bottle Coffee doing Finance and Strategy. I spent last summer working for Intelligent Partnership in London (I am a dual citizen of the UK and the US, so I had to put that passport to use before Brexit ruined everything). The summer before, I worked for both Hard Yaka and Shift Payments in San Francisco. Intelligent Partnership, Hard Yaka, and Shift Payments are all centered around how the data revolution is shaking up existing financial systems, and spurred a passion in me to pursue a better understanding of how "value" is determined and changes in a modern society. That is what drove me to True Ventures, because in my mind the academic bones of venture capital is predicting how perceptions of value will change in order to identify, and ultimately capitalize on, nascent markets. As for Blue Bottle, they make the best coffee on earth. Who wouldn't be ecstatic to work for a company that perpetually operates in that state of caffeinated bliss?

I truly love history because it contextualizes everything I learn, both inside and outside the classroom. As my first history teacher ever told me, if life is like the worn-out analogy we've all heard so many times: floating down a river, then history is your map.

This last semester I was studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh and when I wasn't cutting my teeth on the Scottish dialect, I was "munro bagging" (read: climbing mountains) in the Scottish highlands.

Favorite book at the moment: 'Debt: the First 5000 Years' by David Graeber. Read it and learn what every introduction to economics class is doing wrong.

Go Bears!